


Analysis of the Obvious

by Anonymous



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Other, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-13
Updated: 2008-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Analysis of the Obvious

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [punk_pony](http://punk_pony.livejournal.com)'s request, in the 2005 [Anglican Doorway](http://community.livejournal.com/anglicandoorway) ficathon, of "slight angst [with] happy ending; protective/brotherly Sean."

> It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
> 
> ~Alfred North Whitehead
> 
> But the human understanding is like a false mirror, which receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
> 
> ~Francis Bacon

"He’s in love with you," I told Viggo. "Don’t take it personally." The ripples from my hook spread out in the silence, distorting the precise reflection of the real world that had been there a moment before.

"I won’t," he said.

We took two trout that morning. Decent breakfast, with herbs from the boxes in my windows, and that, I thought, was that.

It’s never that.

I slept badly that night; the phone call back home to the girls had left me feeling unsettled, and the air didn’t move between the rooms in my suite. It was harder for me to adjust myself to the time change and the season change than anyone else, I think; I sometimes felt I spent too much time in planes ever to adjust to being in England or in New Zealand, too much time nerving myself to be in planes or relaxing afterwards ever to be fully out of them and on the ground.

In the morning, my eyes felt full of crumpled paper towels, absorbing all the moisture from them right as Dianne was dabbing something slick I didn’t want to think about onto my forehead. Orlando groaned as he reached for his contacts, demanding "If I whinge hard enough, will PJ stop making me wear the bastard things?" but quietly.

Viggo came in just as I was leaving, his green sweatshirt ripped at the shoulders; he looked as though he’d slept in the woods again last night. He gripped my shoulder, and I dipped my chin at him. As the door swung shut, I heard Orlando’s voice start bouncing off the walls, and was momentarily glad I was well out of it. Not that I didn’t like him; I did. He was just fucking exhausting first thing in the morning, even when he was hung-over, and Viggo’s presence always seemed to ratchet his energy up several notches.

Orlando was worse than any girl with PMS with the mood swings, or really, with the mood varieties. When he was with the hobbits he was more exhausting than a toddler (my heart clenched as I remembered Evie the last time I was in the same bloody country as she was, barely recognizing me), but I’d seen him sitting with Ian, one ankle on the other knee, just listening, his eyes half-closed and his head tilted back to avoid the smoke from the cigarette in his hand. He could talk about Chekhov technique, or footie, just as easily.

No one got into Guildhall who was stupid. I knew that.

I knew it more when I worked with him. Sometimes, he was willing to work harder than I would have believed possible for a twenty-two-year-old. I’d never been that determined at his age. I’d not been that ambitious.

He was good. He vibrated with frenetic energy anytime he wasn’t on-camera or in-character, he drank too much on weekends, he wore fucking eyeliner and kissed the hobbits far too often, but he was a damned good actor and would only get better.

Watching him and Viggo was odd — Viggo never looked directly at him; Orlando would look nowhere else. He certainly listened to me, to Ian, to John, but he watched Viggo in a way he watched no one else. It was easy enough to see how much he was pleased when any of us complimented him, and easier still to see how much he tried for Viggo’s approval.

That day on set, I tried to ignore the interplay between them, Orlando clearly confused why Viggo was even more vague and disconnected than usual. He stared down the length of his sword between takes, the point propped on the ground between his knees. Orlando at first threw himself into being even more of a live wire than usual, and then apparently decided it was one of those days when Viggo had gone all Method on us, and there would be no getting anything out of him unless one was in character as well.

Orlando was no Method actor. He could get into character so easily — or he could now, at any rate; the first few weeks of filming had been a horrible struggle for him, I’d heard, "hit-and-miss" not beginning to describe it — that it was pointless. He needed to burn off the energy he accumulated being Legolas anyway.

So he bounced around while Pete and Marc Davies checked sightlines and compared Polaroids of last week to today’s set, and if his contactless eyes glanced over at Viggo a little more often than they did anyone else, well, he’d been doing that all along.

I hate going through divorces.

That night at the pub, Viggo drank his beer and let his eyes roam the room, unfocused, as if he’d spent the day with a joint instead of pipeweed. I tried to talk to him, but when his answers were monosyllabic or nonexistent, gave up. He went home early, didn’t offer anyone a ride. Orlando went in Dom’s car, and I caught a cab back to my place. You’d think after all these years of living alone, even if on-and-off, I’d know to leave a light on in the morning, but apparently I didn’t. Thank fucking christ I wasn’t a hobbit, because I’d stubbed every toe on my left foot and their Feet call was generally around five ack emma.

Sleeping was good. Beer helps with sleeping. Not with getting up, I admit, but in a well-ordered universe, that would never be necessary. This, of course, is not a well-ordered universe. Evidence: I had a half-six makeup call the next day. No well-ordered universe would include such things.

The half-six makeup call included Viggo bitching about how long it took for him to be made suitably filthy and how it would be simpler for him just to stop showering—"what, you shower?" José muttered — and roll around outside. I tuned him out until he stopped. Which, coincidentally, was at the exact moment that the trailer door banged shut, with Orlando on this side of it.

"Morning," he said.

"Indubitably," Viggo replied, before José shut his mouth and dabbed something clear and gooey on his lips. "Yuck." Orlando snickered, and plopped down in his chair. As Dianne started brushing Max Factor onto his forehead, his eyes started flicking over the script in his lap, with his lines highlighted in yellow, Aragorn's in green, Frodo's in blue. The strains of the Kinks drifted over from the hobbit trailer, only soft because of the hundred metres that separated us. How _their_ stylists put up with it, I’d never know.

"Poor Ian," I mumbled.

"Poor Ian, hell," Orlando said, looking up. "It’s his CD."

Dianne poked him. "Stop talking, or I’ll smudge you." He leaned back and grinned at her. "Even if you try to charm me, a smudge is a smudge," she scolded.

Movie making is not a glamorous experience; it’s mostly all about "hurry up and wait", and that day was no exception. The air warmed quickly after the half-six makeup call, and soon Viggo and I were both sweating under our heavy coats. "Of course I shower," he muttered. "Who wouldn't after standing around wearing this for twelve hours?"

"Maybe we'll get lucky tonight," I said. "Maybe we'll be out of here by six."

"When was the last time that happened?"

"When the second A.D. had an asthma attack," Orlando contributed. I looked at him. "I'm just sayin'," he said, and stepped over to sit down next to Viggo, just a little too close.

"When was that?" I asked, since I didn't recall Janey ever having an asthma attack.

"Few months ago. You were…" he wrinkled his forehead for a moment, and then he glanced around to check where the makeup artists were, which brought his head just an inch or two closer to Viggo's. "I dunno, actually. Not here. Maybe it was when you were doing that scene with Merry 'n' Pippin?"

"Orlando, that was _ages_ ago," I pointed out. He shrugged, and passed a hand over the patterned bandanna holding his braids in place.

"D'you remember, Vig?"

"No."

"Oh, come on, it was the day I fell asleep in your lap with the book on Asian mythology over my face and Dianne woke me up shrieking _you bastard son of a bitch goddam olive-skinned elf_. You nearly pissed yourself laughing."

Viggo shrugged. The outdoor sets always smelled of leaf-mould and plastic, and a breeze mixed them, scrambling the brain. Nothing was what it looked like, and we weren't where we were supposed to be, except when it was, and we were.

The branch of the white maire sapling outside creaked against the ‘phone line. Everything was a little faded in the dimness of the kitchen — there was no need for me to turn on the lights, and the habit from Sheffield of keeping the light bill down had never truly vanished. I moved automatically, mind drugged with sleep and the pleasure that comes with sleep, turning on the stove and not thinking at all until the water boiled.

Orlando’s knock startled me enough that I spilled the loose leaves across the counter. "Brat," I said, and let him in. He seemed drained of colour as well. His T-shirt was faded and stained, possibly with salt water, possibly with beer. He smiled wanly and took the mug I held out to him.

"Northern barbarian," he said.

I snorted and poured the water through the strainer, careful not to splash. "If I’d known you were coming by, I’d’ve got out the bone china," I said. "White with one, am I right?"

"Yeah."

Even his voice was lacklustre. I didn’t say anything, just poured the milk in and handed him the sugar tin and a spoon. He sat down in the least rickety of the straight-back chairs — cushions were for nancies, like American football, with all that padding — in the kitchen and started stirring.

The tea was too hot and burned my tongue. I added more milk. "Needed some England?"

"Needed some truth." His spoon clinked against the sides of the mug.

"Well, tea’s a good substitute. Might have some candied ginger in the cupboard’f you want," I said, gesturing towards the cupboard over the refrigerator.

"No, thanks." He put the mug down, very precisely, on exactly the same ring of moisture it had left. His tea sloshed in the cup, the colour of nineteenth-century armaments books. "You ever been in love?"

"Every time I get married."

"No, really."

"Really." The light seeping in the windows over the sink etched his eyes and jaw like a Caravaggio, and I wondered why he didn’t just go wank in a mirror. It would have made Viggo’s life so much easier.

"Imagine that."

"Don’t have to."

He huffed a little, and then chuckled. "I deserved that." He blew on his tea. "I don’t know what I’m doing wrong."

"I thought you were doing okay," I said, raising an eyebrow. He’d remembered all his lines, all six of ‘em in the last week, kept his costume neat enough to retain his balls, and hadn’t showed up hung-over any more often than the rest of us.

"Fuck, Sean, you’ve _seen_ me. I keep trying, and it’s like, it's like he doesn't care at all, like flirting with a blank wall." That tenor that had astounded me the first time I heard it, coming out of the delicate-looking bloke with the high cheekbones, was no longer like sun-dried clay, but had cracks within it; clay that had been dropped and glued back together, and now it was falling again, and all I could do was watch it sink toward the ground and wait for it to shatter.

I shrugged and dropped another sugar cube into my mug. I don’t like sugar in my tea.

"You’re not going to help me, are you."

"It’s your problem," I said.

"I know." He drained the mug. "I guess I was expectin’ too much. Always do. Grew up hearing about the forest of crutches left by the healed pilgrims at the cathedral, but I used up all my miracles with my back." He shrugged. "That’s what I get, I get to live. Not a bad deal. My dad didn’t get to live. Lot of the people he fought with didn’t get to. It’s just I can’t help thinking, like it’s worth it without being in love at least once."

"You’re twenty-three," I pointed out.

"Started sleeping around when I was fourteen." I winced. "Sorry. Don’t think your girls are as fucked up as I was, if that’s any consolation."

"Some." He sat quietly for a minute or two longer, and then got up and rinsed out his mug. The water was clear on his fingers and he flicked the droplets into the sink.

"Sorry for bursting in on you like this," he said, and the light was strong enough that I could see the bewilderment in his eyes. He had expected something from me, something he might have had a right to, and I wanted to say a single sentence that would balance what I had said to Viggo in the warm damp of the riverbank, but "It’s all right," was all I could muster.

He smiled and turned to go. "See you tomorrow, yeah? We’ll save the world from evil and all, can’t forget to do that in between drinking ourselves stupid." As he opened the door, sunlight flooded in, and he was a silhouette against the influx of brightness. I squinted, and his outline blurred and rippled in rainbow colours.

It wasn’t until he was outside that I said, "You don’t have to try. Let him come to you."

I’m sure he heard me, but I didn’t hear him go down the garden path, busy as I was in banging my head on the table. I don’t know who I thought I was protecting.

The next time we had a running sequence, Orlando’s back seized up badly enough that he asked to go get his pills. He never asked that. Two weeks before, he would have batted his lashes at Viggo and said, "Oi, Vig, help me over to the cuntebago?" but he hobbled off, in such obvious pain that I heard Billy mutter, "And he bungee jumps. Daft prick."

"You’d think that’d fuck up his back worse than this," Dom agreed.

"Bungee jumping is winning over the accident. Coming out of a fall whole. He’ll want to go this weekend." Viggo was sifting through the dirt under a juniper bush.

"He tell you that?" Astin asked, raising an eyebrow.

Viggo glanced at him. "Doesn't have to," he said. "The way he talks about it, like it’s something more than fun. It’s not fun. It’s fixing what’s broken, fixing himself without being noticeable."

It was like looking through water full of fish, the silver quivers in what should be transparent and tranquil. But maybe the distubance was from a hook, and all the fish were gone.

"Nothing personal, Sean," the second message on my answer phone when I came home a few nights later said, "but you have no idea what you’re talking about." Coming after a sleepy message from the girls, who finished with "We miss you. When are you going to die so you can come home?", I felt like a right ruddy pillock.

"I know," I said, and the bottle cap from the beer clinked in agreement on the counter-top. "I’m sorry."

"Not that I mind. You’ve redeemed yourself. I’d be kinda brassed off—"

"_Brassed off_?" I blurted, and rewound. Yep. Brassed off, he’d said.

"—but I’ve got something to cheer me up, and it’s not alcohol, as it would be if I’d listened to you. Except that I did, so maybe I should add alcohol to it. That sounds like a good idea. Hey, Orlando? Wanna get the red wine from the den?" My lips twitched. I still wasn’t sure if this was a joke, but when I heard Orlando’s laughter and a thump, the beer splattered out of my mouth and all over the toaster. "You did your best, Sean. Thanks for that."

I looked out the window, and every leaf was still, exactly where it should be.


End file.
